Category Archives: nordic

Iceland Feb 15: Warm Baths and Cool Lights

Bonus of new blog over OffExploring blog, I can see if you’re reading it! Twelve people read it yesterday. Discounting the one I know is in the USA, that means eleven people I know read my blog. And 62 views is an unimaginable number. I know how it happened – every time anyone looked at a picture in my gallery it counted as a view. A couple of people looked at all eighteen and read the blog and racked up nineteen views each. But still, it’s very exciting to see the numbers. You can’t hide from me!

And now on to last night’s entertainment.

I was picked up at 5.30 on the dot for the Warm Baths and Cool Lights trip. I’ve done this before and there were only three of us so the fifteen packed into the minibus this evening. Siggi, our guide, chatted away and off we went, via Þingvellir, to Laugavatn. I said the weather was disappointing in Reykjavík; well, it’s certainly snowed elsewhere! Although it was pretty dark and the windows were smudged with dirt/rain/snow/ice, the world was unmistakably white once we’d left the city behind and although it was even harder to be sure, it looked like the road was nothing but ice. The roundabout when we came into Laugavatn was definitely a disc of ice several inches thick.

We were delivered to Laugavatn Fontana, where I entertained myself by feeling very cosmopolitan and superior by taking the obligatory naked shower, whereas most of my fellow travellers conveniently didn’t see the sign. Anyway, I know I went into the non-chlorinated water clean and shiny.

I don’t know what they’ve done to the pools at Laugavatn since I was last there. Sæla, the long shallow one, felt much warmer than usual. Viska, the raised hot pot, felt much cooler. Lauga, the mini swimming pool, felt warmer and the newest pool, the lava one that doesn’t seem to have a name, was painfully hot. I did fifty lengths in Lauga – less impressive if I tell you I estimate it to be somewhere between five and ten metres long. I sat on a rock doing a mermaid impression and trying not to boil in the lava pool, dipped into Viska a few times because it’s very weird for it not to be painful in there and spent most of my time lounging around in Sæla. There are some black stone sculptures in there. Some are good for lying against, one is nearly a circle and you can either curl up inside it or entertain yourself blocking one or two of the three jets that squirt out of it to see what happens to the others and there’s one shaped like a giant cup with a big fountain going into it. That one’s excellent for sitting in, even if the water sloshes over the edge when you do as if you’ve caused a huge tidal wave. Obviously I sat in it.

I even ventured into Ylur, the sauna (the wooden benches are too hot and the German boys sat in there with me) and then into Gufan, the three steam rooms. Those are fun! They sit directly over the hot spring so the heat and smell depend on what the Earth feels like doing. Today one of them was stone cold and the other two were really really hot. They’re also really dark for some reason. I don’t sit down for fear of getting lost and if you’ve ever tried inhaling sulphur, you’ll understand why I don’t go in Gufan very much.

As usual, the time was up far too quickly. Floating from one pool to another, trying not to touch the handrails as you climbed out of and into pools because they were so cold, it felt like I had forever and then suddenly it was 9 o’clock and I had to get out. There is a big red LED clock which also shows the humidity and the temperature. I watched the temperature climb from 6.3° to 7.5°.

They say that you need three things for the Northern Lights – cold, clear and crisp and we didn’t have any of them. Iceland is warmer than it is at home. You also need total darkness and aurora activity. Total darkness is easy enough – there are vast parts of Iceland with no street lights but aurora activity is very temperamental and if the sky is blanketed in clouds, there’s no chance. To quote Siggi: “You have to have clear skies. What we’ve got this instant – this is terrible” and “There are high clouds, low clouds and medium clouds. We’ve got a bit of everything”. He said it might be clearer down on the south coast so we drove south to where we met the Ring Road just west of Selfoss. Still very cloudy. We headed west, to Hveragerði. “We’re going to drive up the mountain to 450m. It’ll probably be foggy at the top but we’ll see what happens when we come down.” I, for one, was not fooled. I knew perfectly well that we were going back to Reykjavík and we were not aurora hunting. It had been cloudy and rainy all day, it was cloudy and rainy as we were driving around. There was no way we were going to see any lights. We did make a quick stop in the Bláfjall “I thought I saw a star! But it was just an aeroplane.” All the same, we stopped and got out to check that the sky was definitely still full of clouds. It definitely was.

I got home at 11.20, which is nice and early. The trouble was that at about 3.30am, someone started yelling and banging doors. Banging as if to get attention. At that time in the morning, you can jump to some odd conclusions and I began to think that this was a low-tech way of waking everyone for a fire alarm. But no, it was just a drunk person, who yelled and yelled and then started screaming. I have no idea what was happening but it was frightening at that time of night. And the busy road outside had gone silent. Presumably because no one’s heading to or from Keflavík at 3.30 in the morning but it seemed scary for the road to be silent and empty.

The result of all this was that I didn’t even wake up until ten to nine. Having looked out of the window and seen that it’s wet and cloudy and a tiny bit dark, I’m not quite ready to go out yet. I will need to – I have at least three bus journeys to use up, I plan to go swimming in one of the local geothermal pools and I may or may not have eaten absolutely everything I bought yesterday.

Feb 5th 2015 – Keflavik/Reykjavik

Captain’s log, stardate 050220151346

I departed Heathrow on the good ship Snæfellsjökull at about half past eight, having achieved an entire three seats to myself. I looked through the films and decided on The Beach – only fifteen or so years late. I had no idea what it was about – people looking pretty in front of nice scenery, maybe. Forty minutes in, they’d found the beach and there was still an hour and a half to go. That hour and a half was definitely not what I’d been expecting and it all made much more sense when the credits came up and I discovered it was a Danny Boyle film. As the film went on, I had a little look around the cabin and noticed a lot of men in glasses. Well, there’s only one explanation for serious-looking men in glasses on a plane – spies. Spies, who seemed to be lurking near me. I also watched eight episodes of Shaun the Sheep before we touched down at Keflavík, where the weather was surprisingly mild. The only snow I saw was heaped up in mounds around the car park and the thermometer in the coach that took me into Reykjavík said 5°C, much warmer than I’d expect at 1am in Iceland in February.

As we drove across Reykjanes, I spied an Orkan petrol station. I’ve spied these hundreds of times in the last few years but it occurred to me that “vowel+n” means “the” when stuck on the end of a word. The Ork? Now, we all know – we should all know, because I rave enough about this – that Tolkien loved Iceland and the sagas. There’s plenty of the Volsung Saga about Middle Earth – it’s almost a blueprint for The Hobbit and the dwarves’ names were lifted straight from the Poetic Edda, in order. Now, I don’t think Tolkien ever came to Iceland and I don’t know if Orkan existed back then anyway, but if Sauron and Saruman and their forces of evil represent industrialisation, do the Orcs therefore represent the oil industry? Probably not. Ah, the things you think about in a coach at 1am.

I have never been taken from Keflavík to Reykjavík the same way twice and in the dark, it’s particularly easy to lose your bearings. The Greater Reykjavík Area is just a mass of orange lights, far bigger than it should be, far too big for a small city. The first landmark you spot is a green flashing light in the distance, from a building you can’t see perched on a hill you can’t see and you put on your best Johnny Depp voice and whisper “It’s the Pearl…”

After that it vanished. The Pearl is on the southern side of the city and it was quite a way off. Soon I was lost and confused. We hadn’t been past Taco Bell, we hadn’t come down the road that curves to the right. We had to still be in Hafnarfjörður, which has to be as big as Reykjavík itself. And then I saw the seafront and just as I knew where I was, it was confirmed by Hofði on the left and Harpa shimmering away in front. We’d managed to come round to the north of Reykjavík.

We were put on separate buses and taken out to our various lodgings. I was the last to be delivered, right out in the suburbs, almost in Kópavogur. If you haven’t already heard, I’ve made mistake after mistake with accommodation this time. I booked the cheapest guesthouse in the country and then read the reviews and realised that was a mistake. No cancellation. Bye bye money. I found somewhere nicer and nearly as cheap. But it turns out it’s two and a half miles from the city centre, barely in Reykjavík at all. But we haven’t come on to the troubles yet.

I was a little bit nervous about arrival. I’d put on the booking form that I’d be arriving late but it’s one thing arriving at 1.30am at a hotel with a receptionist on duty twenty-four hours a day and another arriving at 1.30am at a guesthouse and I think the driver who delivered me guessed that because once I was inside and had pressed the bell for help, I heard the engine clattering away outside for far longer than it normally would. Greyline are fantastic. Anyway, I signed a form and was given a key and after a mini lecture about what floor to go to (“on the second floor. The third floor. We call this the first floor, so first, second, third”) I went upstairs – no lift, so good thing I packed light – and found my room. The man on reception had shown me the number engraved on the key – 28 – and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I was just about to go back down and plead for help when it occurred to me to look at the tag. 33 – ah, there was a 33! It’s a biggish room, not enough light but that’s fairly normal for hotel-type places, and looking out over the closest thing Iceland has to a motorway – a duel carriageway heading from Reykjavík out to Kópavogur, Garðabaær, Hafnarfjördur and Reykjanesbær.

On Thursday morning I was awake far too early for someone who didn’t get to bed until 2am, mostly thanks to the M25 right outside. It was still dark but it was so hot in my room that the window had been open when I arrived and I left it open. I went down for breakfast – toast with some kind of spread that made the bread go squidgy and very watery liquid that tasted vaguely orangey. I packed a few things and headed out. The closest bus stop that I knew of for certain was at the Natura. The Pearl isn’t so far from here so I went up there, enjoyed the view, froze my ears off because I didn’t bother taking my hat out with me and then set off on the quick hop-skip-and-jump down the side of the hill that would deliver me to the bus stop. I wanted to find somewhere closer for regular use but this would do fine for now.

Off I went down the hill. Iceland has had snow not too long ago. There are still bits of it and the side roads are still covered in ice. This hill, I exaggerate not, was an ice rink. I put on the Yaktrax and they made no difference. I took teeny tiny steps, clinging to thin patches in the ice, anywhere grassy, anywhere with a bit of proper snow, using trees as ropes. At one point I even had to climb down a rock, which turned out far more slippery than I expected. What should have taken five or ten minutes seemed to take an eternity and several times I stopped and had to take a while to decide what was the best way of tackling the next bit of seemingly-impossible pathway. Taking photos on the way was unthinkable. I had to get in position, plant both feet properly and only then could I let my concentration go anywhere other than my feet. Two people came up the hill and I had to stand still and wait until they were past (with the comment “very dangerous!” as they passed) before I could go on. It’s just not possible to slither down an ice rink with other people visible, it’s too much of a distraction.

I got my bus eventually, went to Hlemmur, the main bus station in the city centre and bought my bus passes – a three day for now and a one day for Sunday. The card machine rejected my credit card. Then it rejected my spare credit card. Then it rejected my debit card. I concluded it was a problem with the machine rather than with three cards and indeed, the ATM was fine, so I bought my cards with cash and then took a bus up to Lækjatorg to go shopping. I went round my usual favourite tourist shops, in the bookshop and then in the 1011 for some food before getting the bus back. There is no bus stop anywhere near my guesthouse. I can watch buses sail down the motorway right outside my window but they don’t stop. The nearest stop, as far as I can see, is either up by the Pearl or at Kringlan. It does seem “once you’re out, you have to stay out”. I thought there was a closer stop but it turns out to be in the centre of Kópavogur, which is where the interesting church is, which you can see from this building but it’s not really in walking distance, especially when bands of rain keep sweeping across. They don’t last long. You suddenly notice it’s getting cloudy, then it gets misty, then you get rained on, then suddenly the sun is trying to come out again.

I planned to eat, get my swimming stuff and go to one of the local pools but it’s a long walk back to the bus and I’m going swimming tonight anyway. I have eaten. Iceland no longer seems to do the nice pear juice but there’s now an interesting mixed fruit juice and I’m making plans for the next few days – swimming and abusing the bus passes, mostly.

Finland 2014: Rovaniemi

Yesterday I went into town because I haven’t actually done that yet. Finished with town in less than ten minutes. There’s not much there and what there was appeared to be half-closed. I found myself at the river again – even prettier now because it’s frozen. Or at least, it’s frozen down by the barbecue hut and it’s semi frozen further up – great big sheets of ice flowing down the river and crashing into others and it was all very wintery and very dramatic and I stood there for so long that I nearly froze over.

I decided to warm up at Arktikum, the polar museum which appeared to be just around the next river bend. Well, it is but it’s not accessible from there by foot. I had to cross a fairly major road junction which is not meant for pedestrians.

Arktikum is not hugely exciting. I lay in the Aurora Theatre and watched the Northern Lights and the Finnish and Inuit beliefs about them and then wandered around the western exhibition room, which is on at least two floors with a sloping walkway and covers everything from animal fur to oil to indigenous populations to sledge-building.

The eastern gallery has a display of Sami clothes and possessions and jewellery upstairs, a gallery about two local women and then downstairs various Lapland-themed things – more Sami, some stuffed animals (the moose is enormous!), a petrol station cafe (important social gathering place up here), Bronze Age artefacts, display about the war etc.

By the time I trudged through town to get home, the sun was setting and I followed a road pointing directly at the setting sun. I could hear cars but I couldn’t see them coming at me. Found the town centre fairly easily – the shopping centre is next to the sports centre and that’s just next to the big roundabout and my supermarket and then home is just a few minutes further on.

Getting to the airport is entertaining. There does appear to be a bus running Sundays at the right time but I’m not sure it runs today. There doesn’t seem to be a dedicated “airport bus”. So I called (for booking online needs to be done 24 hours in advance) the airport taxi people. €7 seems reasonable, that’s how much I’d expect the bus to be. They’re going to pick me up at 9.30am which strikes me as a bit late for a 10.45am flight but they know best. After all, Rovaniemi airport is unlikely to be on the same scale as Heathrow.

I woke up this morning to snow. And my room being very hot. This place is interesting. No bin in the room, it feels weird disposing of cheese and chocolate wrappers in the bathroom, no TV (not that I’d be watching it but I like it to be there), the communal kitchen closes at 9pm, which is a bit early. Reception, supposedly open 7.30am to 9pm is never open during the day and I don’t think I’ve ever been able to just open the door and come in. I have a key obviously so I can get in but it feels weird to have to use it every single time. Every day there’s a note on the front door – “if you have a reservation, check the mailbox behind you”. Do they really never ever greet a guest personally? I know I was an exception because I arrived pretty late but it kind of looks like letting yourself in is normal.

And now, to the airport!

Finland 2014: The Northern Lights

Since Rovaniemi city centre isn’t the most beautiful place in Lapland, I decided to head for the river. On a clear bright day – bright in an Arctic way with a blindingly bright but low sun – it was very pretty, everything frosty, the river half frozen. I followed the river and came to a barbecue hut – just a little wooden shelter with wood stacked under the benches and a fire pit outside, with a view between the trees over the river. I would love to come there at night and have a fire but it did perfectly well as a picnic spot.

I carried on, crossed the main road and went into the church park, where an inlet of the river forms a lake and walked round, meeting dogs and contemplating that Rovaniemi doesn’t really have any soul and what I’d do with the new Kiruna if I could, to turn it into a winter wonderland.

By now I was getting cold. Even in winter clothes, the cold gets to you after a few hours outside so I decided to head back into town in search of warmth – a cafe maybe. I came to the church and thought I’d shelter in there, since apparently there are things of interest inside. It was locked.

I wasn’t entirely sure how to get to the city centre so I decided the best course of action was to go to the supermarket and then home for a while to warm up before I went back out. On my way I met two Mormon missionaries (Elder Garrett and Elder Johnson, from the USA – I got confused by Elder Johnson because on his badge, it looked like he had a Finnish first name. It took a long time to finally realise that’s just “elder” in Finnish) and after a chat, they invited me to their Halloween party. Finland just doesn’t seem to do Halloween, I haven’t seen any sign of it here whatsoever.

Outside the supermarket, I met a white fluffy dog I’d met in the park. It was tied up and barking like crazy so when I’d bought lots of chocolate, I went to visit it. Like the huskies, it wanted my pompom and when I took the pompom away, it jumped on me and I hugged it and its fur was so thick!

I sort of intended to go to the party but when I got back, I noticed the Northern Lights leaflets and it was a really clear day and I thought it was something I should do so I booked that instead.

I was half-expecting to be the only one on the trip – it’s not exactly high tourist season but there were seven of us – a Chinese couple, a Portugese woman, a couple that sounded Russian, Nicola, a nurse from Derry working in Finland for a month and me. Our guide was Anthony – an Englishman who’s been living here for ten years.

We were taken to the office first for warm clothes – extra socks, real snowboots, padded quilted overalls like I wore snowmobiling, warm mittens and red furry ear hats. We had a stripy bag to put our own clothes in and then we headed out.

We stopped on the way to base camp at the side of the road to watch the lights. They were a bit pale but visible – streaks across the sky that got a bit brighter and a bit dimmer, a sort of pale blue to the naked eye but bright green on camera, sometimes a cloud, sometimes several bands. The sky was absolutely clear.

We drove on when the lights faded, to our base camp, an old village school, where we left all non-essentials and climbed a hill – Katkevaari, I think – Wolverine Fell. We stopped regularly and the lights made a nice wiggly S in the sky behind us. But at the top, they just stopped playing. There was a very pale arc across the sky from south to north – lights, but really not exciting ones and they didn’t come out on my camera at all.

When we’d all got tired of staring at the stars, Anthony took us into another barbecue hut, just like the one I went in in Sweden, where he had a fire lit. I cooked oat bread on a fork and then tried to melt some Finnish Edam in it while everyone else cooked Finnish sausages – these are precooked and then sealed up so you can throw them in a bag and carry them around the wilderness perfectly safely for a couple of days before warming them up over an open fire and eating them. But they do look raw at first. The bread didn’t work brilliantly but I ate half of it, until I got down to the bit that I’d burnt (in fact, at one point I set it on fire) and the cheese had softened to the point that it became rubbery and almost unchewable.

Hot chocolate and sweet dried bread biscuits were better and then we told our fortunes. We were all given two little tin/lead horseshoes to melt on a big spoon over the fire. When they were melted, we tipped them into a bucket of cold water and then you hold a light up to them and look at the shadow to see what you can see in the shape. Mine came out very silvery – everyone else’s came out covered in little grey bubbles that means money is coming. One of mine – the biggest and therefore the only one relevant – looked like a dragon or a chicken or a mermaid, depending on how you turned it. The smaller piece looked a bit like an animal’s head.

Then we were about done with the campfire. The lights still weren’t playing and it was late so we headed down. Now, climbing the hill was no problem but getting down was. The top is covered with loose rocks and they are covered in ice crystals. When you’re wearing an LED headtorch, it looks like you’re climbing over massive gemstones and it feels like you’re going to slip, all the time, even though they actually weren’t very slippery So progress was slow.

When we reached the school. Anthony told us all to turn out our lights and look at the sky. The Northern Lights had come out to play! Green vertical lights like clumps of pencils, just above the trees, dancing and moving and putting on a lovely display. I couldn’t really get them on camera but it was the best display of the night and posed so prettily over the trees.

We changed back into our own clothes and got back in the bus for the long ride back to Rovaniemi. The last excitement of the night was a mountain hare hopping along in front of the bus – it was huge and it was absolutely pure white. No moose, no reindeer, no wolves, no bears. Apparently we were in bear territory and evidence of bears has been seen up there. I had no idea there were wild bears still livingin Europe! Anthony said it’s extremely rare to actually see one because they avoid humans, he told us about people who work for the Finnish equivalent of Ordnance Survery, who spend all their time outside in the mountains, seeing so much fresh evidence of bears but never actually seeing one in their entire lifetime.

We got back about 2.30am and it was so cold that I had to go and sit on the radiator to thaw out. The radiator is in the shower so that was comfortable.

Finland 2014: The Santa Claus Village

First impressions of Rovaniemi by daylight: good. Or at least, this end. There are little clumps of trees around the roads and between the houses, Lapland-style mini forests of pine and birch and it all feels lovely. A sprinkling of sparkly ice is very pretty.

Breakfast of bread and rolls and some kind of slightly odd-tasting fruit squash that I can’t identify and cold chocolate (don’t put sugar cubes in it, however cute sugar cubes are, they just don’t dissolve) and then I packed and headed off to the bus station in search of local bus no. 8.

The bus station, as it so often is in these parts, is for long distance buses. Fortunately, the bus stop for the local bus is right next door. Of course, bus 8 actually starts from the railway station which is even closer to home. I managed to interpret the timetable which is written entirely in Finnish – not even any Swedish to help me out – and decided that although the timetable says “to the Arctic Circle” rather than the Santa Claus Village, that’s probably because they don’t want to admit to the existence of the Santa Claus Village. I had 45 minutes to wait for my bus so I went across the road to the supermarket.

In Finland, it’s hard to get nice bread. 95% of it seems to be either this black rye bread or just plain tasteless slightly plastic sliced white bread which is inedible unless toasted. The guesthouse does have a toaster but it’s not as if I can take it out with me for the day. I eventually settled on some rolls like the one I had for breakfast – a bit nothingy, almost taste a bit like they’ve been boiled rather than baked but the best of a not-brilliant selection. I did linger over the skyr because it’s weird to see something Icelandic and therefore something sort of homey (apparently I’m now part Icelandic) somewhere that’s not Iceland. I bought some chocolate, Swedish Marabou which is very tasty, a bar of the Finnish chocolate like my new friend gave me yesterday, only I got the plain stuff rather than the raspberry yoghurt stuff and some pringles. Finnish crisps do look interesting but they also come in the biggest bags I’ve ever seen.

I checked with the driver that the bus definitely went to the Santa Claus Village (see? learning from yesterday’s mistake), was given a return ticket despite confused incoherent babbling that made me certain I’d accidentally bought a single one and off we went, through Rovaniemi. It doesn’t look like a particularly inspiring town. Its history, in short, is that it was nice here until the war, when the Germans burnt it to the ground as punishment for the Finns working with Russia, as far as I understand. If by “working with” you mean “occupied by despite holding out against them longer than should have been humanly possible”. This is my understanding of it. After the war Rovaniemi was rebuilt on a grid system, with modern uninteresting buildings. But behind the town are two rivers and that all looked very pretty. Parts of the rivers are frozen – not enough that I’d even think about trying to walk on it but then I won’t walk on the Tjornin in Reykjavik even when I can see the locals playing on it.

The Santa Claus Village and the Arctic Circle are actually about ten miles out of town, or at least that’s what the sign said. But maybe the sign meant a hiking trail which doesn’t take the direct route the road does. It’s a little way out of town, anyway.

The Santa Claus Village is an odd place. It’s open all year round but I suspect it makes most sense in December, when the ground is thick with snow and there are hundreds of overexcited children there. On a grey morning in October, it just feels a bit weird. The main attraction is Father Christmas, hiding in his office and then the second main attraction is a long low gallery of shops – some souvenirs, some local handicrafts, bits and pieces – like the entire tourist shops of a fairly large city all squashed into one corridor. And half of them weren’t open. There were a few cafes and restaurants but not all of them looked open either.

The first thing I did was find the posts marking the Arctic Circle and take a photo of myself with them. The second thing I did was take photos of myself with the line painted on the ground. My guidebook says “give yourself over to this indulgence and snap away – it is one of the few signs marking the circle”.

I did enjoy Santa’s official post office. The staff were all dressed up as elves and didn’t seem to mind at all, there were postcards of all kinds, Christmas decorations, Finnish bits and pieces, Moomin things and plenty of tables for writing your postcards before picking a postbox for them. There was a “now” one and a “Christmas” one, depending on when you wanted your postcard delivered. Everything that goes from this post office gets an official postmark but what amused me is that this also goes for the normal postbox outside, which is used by locals, as demonstrated by one pulling up outside in his van and dumping a handful of letters in it.

There was also the holiday village, where you can either stay in the hotel or in one of the cottages and then at the other side, a showroom for snowmobiles and log cottages. And at the back were the activities. There was the reindeer enclosure – the reindeer were kept out of sight but there was a Sami tent and a little woodfire which smelled amazing and then they would bring out a reindeer and a sledge on wheels for a run round the forest for an extortionate price. I lurked to watch the reindeer – a little girl fed it a handful of reindeer moss – I have no idea what it’s actually called in real English – and its nose! It woffles its nose as it hoovers up the moss and it was adorable!

Next door was the snowmobile track. Nothing you can do with a snowmobile when it’s not snowy. With a dog or reindeer sledge you can use wheels instead of runners but all you can do with a snowmobile is swap it for a quadbike and then it’s not a snowmobile. A bit further down was the husky park.

There are hundreds of them! When they’re not running, they’re kept in round fenced enclosures, two to four of them together and they’re very alert and very keen when visitors come round. Every single one of them took a liking to the pompom on the end of my long-tailed hat so I teased them with that until at last I met a dog who could climb the fence and hung over the top, at which point I tucked the pompom away in case she jumped down and went for me. Fortunately she didn’t but I definitely backed off once she was hanging over the enclosure.

There was a puppy – three and a half months apparently – and she was the exception to the “don’t put your hand in the wires” rule. We were encouraged to play with her. I tried making a video of playing pompom with one group – they had a wooden board covering part of their enclosure to about my eye level and I soon discovered that if I waved the pompom above it, they’d jump up. I tried videoing it but because this camera videos a bit weirdly, I didn’t get anything.

So many dogs to play with! Pure white ones, mostly black ones, wolf-coloured grey/brown ones. Brown eyes, blue eyes, one of each eyes. I don’t think I really realised how many colour variations there are in puppies.

I bought a t-shirt in the shopping area and when I came outside, much to my delight, it was snowing. So obviously, the best thing to do is run back to the Arctic Circle lines and take more photos because snow is brilliant.

I investigated Santa’s office – there were more shops! One was a tablewear outlet, where I hovered over Moomin mugs and plates, one was jewellery, one was one of these design shops where everything looks lovely but is a bit pointless and one was the Santa shop. Mostly it was just bags with Santa written on them but I was very tempted by a hoodie with the coordinates on. However, I have a t-shirt with them. I went to the very last shop, upstairs, and was tempted by enamel Moomin mugs. And then I decided I’d seen everything there was to see, done everything there was to do and was getting cold so I got the bus back to Rovaniemi.

The snow had turned to a sort of drizzy dampness so this morning’s glittery ice was all gone and replaced by a grey miserable damp town. I came home instead, picnicked on my bed, found the guest kitchen (having arrived late last night, I haven’t actually had a tour of the building) and braved the shower with a radiator in it.

Finland 2014: The Great Train Adventure

The moral of today’s story is this: if you have a bad feeling about something, listen to it.

I got up nice and early, packed and walked to the station via the seafront and the main shopping street. Bought a couple of bottles of drink, looked at the departure board and saw my train at Track 11. I went to Track 11.

Now, first of all there was no information on the board at the head of Track 11. But there was a train there. There was no information on the signs by each door. I was a bit doubtful but other people were getting on, so I got on.

Do you see where this is going? I didn’t but as it turns out, it was not Rovaniemi, where I was intending to go. Ten or fifteen minutes before we were due to depart, there was an announcement. Everyone else in my car jumped up and started grabbing luggage. I didn’t know what was happening but I copied – clearly we were getting off this train for some reason. Except that we were only given about ten seconds notice and then the train started moving. Within a few minutes, the six passengers on board had all congregated in Car 2, some of them were on the phone and most of them were laughing. I, obviously, don’t speak a word of Finnish but I gathered that something was up. Eventually I asked and was told that this train was taking us to the depot. It’s fine, we’ll just take a taxi to the next stop.

Oh no we won’t. We crawled through the outskirts of Helsinki and came almost to a stop just outside Pasila. I was still following everyone else so when they started gathering by the door, I went too. I think the plan genuinely was to jump off a moving train. Moving extremely slowly but still, a moving train. I almost wish we had – that would be a story to tell. However, modern trains have inbuilt safety mechanisms to prevent passengers doing that.

We began to crawl through the depot and then we went into the train wash. That was the point at which everyone started laughing hysterically, because it’s a ridiculous thing to accidentally go through a train wash. For the record, it’s a lot like going through a car wash except that the brushes stay still and you move. Then we were into the building and now getting desperate. It was somewhere around this point that my new friends discovered I don’t speak Finnish and had no real idea of what was happening. The nice man – a journalist, as it happens – had phoned VR, the train company, two or three times and tried to explain that there were six passengers on an out-of-service train but they seemed intent on believing someone had left some luggage on the train and he couldn’t get through to them that it was people left on the train. By now we were inside the depot and starting to pass people. We banged on the windows, then banged with an umbrella. I wasn’t sure whether they were trying to get attention or actually trying to smash the window. Trying to attract attention, trying to make people realise that there aren’t supposed to be passengers on this train, didn’t seem to work – mostly they just waved back.

Finally we came to a stop. The lights had gone out in all the other cars and we were starting to get desperate when finally it dawned on someone outside that we were trapped. A phone call was made and at last the door was released from the outside to free us. I think the others were quite enjoying the adventure but I was quite scared – no Finnish, no idea what was going to happen to me, whether I was going to get to Rovaniemi tonight or at all, how I was going to escape the depot. Fortunately, my friends, now fluent in English and making sure I knew exactly what was happening, pulled me along with them. Across the depot we went, past lots of men in fluorescent clothes looking curious at six passengers with suitcases who are obviously not supposed to be there. We were taken into one of the non-train buildings, where they seemed to store mattresses and pillows and lockers and a man in a fluorescent jacket and matching cap made arrangements for disposing of us and one of my friends handed round chocolate – just like Professor Lupin on the train after the Dementors. Chocolate helps, as did the news that we were going to be taken to Pasila, the nearest station and the first stop after Helsinki Central and that trains to Rovaniemi run all day.

We walked through the tunnels of the depot and were at last released, when the keys to the gate turned up. The day-glo man called us a taxi and off we went to Pasila for €2.77 each. There we went as a group to the ticket office to get our tickets changed. That was no problem – the nice lady even asked if I’d like an upstairs or downstairs seat so I brightened up a lot at that (upstairs, obviously!) and then I went off with two of the ladies to have lunch – or in my case to have some hot chocolate, since I had no intention of explaining the food thing to two strangers, even two strangers who’ve just helped me escape from a train depot.

I have never felt so helpless. I like to think I’m a reasonably competent and capable traveller, if one prone to minor catastrophes but if I’d been on my own on that train, I have no idea what would have happened. Mind you, I wouldn’t have been on it on my own because I was only stupid enough to get on it when I was sure other people were. I’ve also never felt so monolingual. Of the five Finns, four of them definitely spoke English – one sounded properly fluent but the other three could make themselves understood and meanwhile, I don’t speak a word of Finnish or very much of any other language. My French is nowhere near as good as it should be, my Spanish is almost non-existent and as for German, Icelandic, Swedish/Norwegian/Danish, I can recognise and read things reasonably well considering I’ve never had a lesson in any of them but I can’t say a sentence in any.

At 13:12, three hours after I was supposed to depart, I got on my train. And thirty seconds later, the journalist man came to join me. He’s very friendly, full of Finnish history and tales of the places we’re going through and making phone calls to relatives in Rovaniemi to suggest places I should visit but mostly I just wanted to be left alone to eat – I hadn’t actually eaten a thing today, intending to have breakfast on the train at 10am which didn’t happen – and get out my computer and look at the scenery. He finally left me at Tampere, after nearly two hours of trying to keep up an increasingly one-sided conversation. He took all our phone numbers and email addresses and he’s written an article about our adventure. I’m not entirely sure it’s really “news” but still, apparently his boss was excited about the story, so maybe it’ll go in a Finnish newspaper and he’ll send it to all of us.

By 5pm, I was sick of the whole thing. It was dark, there’s only so much fidgeting you can do and although the train has wifi, it’s a bit hit-and-miss (although much better than the wifi on the plane) and it’s getting tedious now. The train I was supposed to be on will be slowing down for its arrival into Rovaniemi right now and I’ve still got three and a quarter hours to go. I’ve seen nothing but darkness from my window for over two hours already.

I counted down the hours from about the time it got dark – I was actually doing a little dance in my seat when it got down to half an hour, half an hour on the train (vaguely to the tune of She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain – if you saw any of those updates on Facebook, I was singing them) and then went to explore a little bit – just the lockers behind me (they have lockers! This is very sensible!) and a peculiar little alcove with a small door up two steps and a rod across the top like a wardrobe but with no hangers and then I discovered there are actually three levels in this particular train because halfway down the stairs was another compartment of seats.

Now I’m on solid ground again, taking the train to the Arctic seems sort of magical again. I was fidgety but I was never really uncomfortable, I mostly had the whole seat to myself, I had the internet, I had a perfectly pleasant time as somehow Helsinki turned into Lapland. Due to the morning’s issues and the fact that I was arriving late, I emailed the guesthouse to say I’d be in about 10.30. They did not say “poor foreigner arriving in the dark in a strange place, we will be waiting for you”. No, they said “Reception closes at 9, we’ll leave your key in the mailbox outside”.

I had had the sense to look up where the place is – I’d had the sense to print a map with my route drawn on it. The only bit left to chance was which side of the station I’d come out on. I wanted to be on the north. And we arrived on the north side! Actually, it transpires the south is some kind of yard and getting across to it would be pretty difficult so I’m very glad about that. The four lane road was exactly where it should have been and when I crossed it (all sparkly with ice, despite the nice journalist man’s niece saying there is no snow here – well, it’s winter wonderland enough for me for now) there was a sign pointing to my guesthouse. The small housing estate took me by surprise but I could see my building – a lit up sign with a picture of a bed on it was a clue so within five minutes, I’d retrieved my key from the mailbox and was swearing at the lock. I have no idea how Finnish locks work. It’s certainly not as easy as “put key in lock and turn”. I don’t know what I did but eventually the door opened. The same upstairs in my room. But I got in. There is a radiator – set to maximum heat – in the shower. Not just in the bathroom, it’s actually in the shower. I’m not entirely sure how comfortable I am with that. But the room is adequate. I don’t know how big my bed is – bigger than single but not as big as double. I have blinds as well as curtains to shut out the light. And they serve breakfast here! Since there’s a guest kitchen, I was expecting to have to forage for myself but no, I will have to appear at breakfast at least tomorrow to hand over my guest card. So there we are, I’ve finally made it to Lapland.

Finland 2014: Helsinki

Helsinki is a jewel. I think I’d forgotten that.

I drove up to Gatwick last night with no problems other than the realisation that my snow boots are much heavier than they look and surprisingly tiring to drive in. Got safely to my pod.

This morning I checked in using the self-service – checking in at a screen is normal, self-service bag drop – and getting to shoot my own bag with a laser gun! – is still very much a novelty, as was breakfast overlooking… well, nothing more exciting really than a road.

Flight went ok. We followed the M25 along the south of London so if you looked across to the left of the plane you could see the skyscrapers in the centre. That Shard is very hard to spot from that distance. It’s hard to make any of them out properly but the Walkie-Talkie is relatively easy to see. The Shard is just a needle and almost invisible.

Once I’d landed at Helsinki, I did a little bus trip out to a suburb called Tikkurila before going into the city centre. I was dropped at the main station – the front is covered in scaffolding but the figures with their globes are left uncoverd – and I walked down to my “hotel” via Stockmann, the main shopping street and the big white cathedral because apparently my memory of Helsinki’s geography is pretty good.

Not something I can say about the hotel. As I was shown my room, I was asked “Have you stayed here before?” I said no politely but thinking “No one has ever or will ever say yes to that because no one in their right mind will come back here”. If I was planning to stay a few days in Helsinki, I think I’d probably be looking for somewhere to move to tomorrow. It’s on the fifth floor of a slightly creepy building with a 1920s style cage lift that scares me and my room is… on the basic side of just about functional. Separate shower and toilets out in the main corridor but on the bright side, there is a kitchen. I am eating bread and butter on my bed rather than actually use it although it looks like the best room in the whole building. And it has wifi.

I went into Helsinki in search of said bread, via the red cathedral on the seafront, a purple ferris wheel that’s sprung up in the last six years and a pack of concrete turtles (the point at which I said out loud “Helsinki, you’ve got cute!”). I went into Stockmann, which has set out an entire Christmas floor which isn’t open until Sunday, into the bookshop to look wistfully at English-language books – it remains my favourite bookshop in the entire world apart from possibly Waterstones at Piccadilly Circus. And finally I found a supermarket near the station, although I seem to have gone in completely the wrong door and missed most of the bakery section.

I’m taking the train up to Rovaniemi tomorrow so there didn’t seem much point in getting more food than will last me tonight and tomorrow.

Iceland summer 2014: Akureyri to Borgarnes and Esja

Suppose I should update the blog for the last three days…

Tuesday

It was grey and rainy and horrible and I’d driven a previously unimaginable distance the day before. I had a lazy day which consisted of eating, a trip into Akureyri town centre to see what I missed on Sunday (not much) and lust after some orange Cintamani mittens. By the way, I love that my tablet offers the word slurp before it realises I’m trying to write Akureyri. In the evening I went to the pool again. Mistake! The biggest hot pot was closed, the main pool was too cold, the beach pool was both too cold and too shallow to fully submerge myself to get out of the wind and the two hot pots were too hot and too crowded. They reopened the big hot pot but I suspect it had been closed because it was too cold, as I discovered when I’d been curled up in it for ten minutes and started shivering. So the pool wasn’t any fun.

Wednesday

I drove back down south, another four hour drive along the Ring Road. I actually took it more slowly than I did on Sunday. I stopped for photos everywhere I spotted a layby or a picnic spot. Unfortunately, they don’t really signpost these so often by the time you’ve spotted them, you have no chance of stopping in time. I stopped at a hamlet in the middle of nowhere at Varmahlid because the car was making a noise like a window wasn’t properly shut and on a whim, I ran into their little supermarket. At last! Plain Milka and plastic cheese slices! I thought these were basic supplies but I haven’t been able to find them in over a week!

I stopped at Bluönduós for lunch but I wasn’t very hungry. I hadn’t been very hungry at breakfast either, which was why I’d accidentally walked off with more rolls than usual.

I stopped at Thingeyrar which was 6km up the best and smoothest gravel road I’ve ever driven on because the church there is supposed to be quite special. It’s a lovely little church but I could have done without the one-to-one guided tour. It has a blue wooden ceiling with 1000 gold stars on it and there are 100 panes in each of 10 windows. 1000 again, because Christianity came to Iceland in 1000AD. The church itself only dates back to 18-something but everything inside is older. The altarpiece is from about the 16th century and was made for a monastery in Nottingham. My nice guide was very vague on the details of how it ended up in a church in the Icelandic countryside.

My next major stop was at Ósar, also about 6km out ofy way. I went to the Icelandic Seal Centre to see if I could see seals sunbathing but it was the wrong tide. It was also really windy and really cold. Also I learnt how inconsistent Icelanders are with their English pronunciation. Sheep are seep but seals are shiels.

I made a couple of stops on my way over the last bit of mountain, paused in Borgarnes and then headed on to Akranes where I planned to spend the night. The trouble is, Akranes isn’t such a nice place. It’s very concretey, very industrial, very functional. I had a look at their famous 1km stretch of golden beach – that is not a standard km, that’s for sure – and then decided I’d rather spend my last two nights just up the road in my beloved Borgarnes. So I drove back.

Thursday

It’s my birthday! I’d long planned to spend it climbing Esja, “Reykjavik’s mountain” but when I got up, it was windy. I went to get fuel and food, everyone ignored the fire alarm because apparently no one knew what they were supposed to do and we carried on shopping.

It was still windy, really cold and,my satnav couldn’t find Esja. I came back to the hotel to consider what to do. No, I was going to climb the mountain! I found directions, the satnav understood them and off I went. Past Akranes, through the Hvalfjord tunnel – 1000kr in both directions! – and found the parking space.

I was there reasonably early, it turned out. I packed my bag and headed off. 15 minutes later, it became clear I’d packed too much. It was like carrying another person on my back and there was no way I was going to make it to the top loaded down as I was. Reluctantly I returned to the car, dumped 90% of my luggage and set off on attempt two.
It was really hard. It was so steep and so gravelly and absolutely everyone overtook me, then vanished and I was trundling along, stopping every ten yards.

It seemed like months before I reached Sign 3, where I didn’t realise the path split. Unbeknownst to me, I picked the shorter but steeper and far more brutal route. It was horrendous. It was so steep it was getting on for vertical, it was a mess of shattered rock and one bit was such an awkward scramble I thought I was going to fall backwards off the mountain. Further up the path ran out and it became a network of tracks which were barely followable, up to the top. Well, up to Steinn, the normal person top. The actual top is a bit higher but it’s on almost vertical compressed ash and scree, very dangerous and only to be attempted if you know what you’re doing. Steinn was fine for me. The view! You could see for miles, right over Reykjavik and most of Reykjanes, almost to Keflavik. You couldn’t see anything north unfortunately because of the knife-edge ridge behind us but the south was plenty good enough.

Getting down was another adventure. I’d worn my Mammut shoes, which are half trail shoe, half climbing shoe and therefore perfect for scrambling my way over Iceland’s various rocks. But they are terrible for picking your way downhill! My toes slid forward and got crushed and there’s no padding or give in them whatsoever, so by the time I’d got to the bottom I could hardly walk. Actually, it was so steep and the path so loose, I’d more minced than walked down, I’d yelled my unfavourable opinion of the path so loudly half of Reykjavik probably heard it and I struggled so much with the scrambly section going down that first I’d frozen, not dared take another step because the mountain was certain to throw me down itself face first, and then been offered help by a passing stranger going uphill. If you ever climb Esja, turn right at Sign 3. It’ll save you a world of pain.

I thought I’d go swimming afterwards. It seemed a good thing to do after a mountain and I wanted to go to Borgarnes pool so I went straight there – coming home would mean I probably wouldn’t go out again. The building itself needs replacing, and the changing rooms in a dark concrete basement are just creepy. But the pools are lovely! Three largish hot pots of assorted temperatures, a nice warm beach pool, an indoor swimming pool, a splash pool for three slides and an outside lane pool with views over the bay, cool enough for proper swimming but still warm enough to swim in outside in Iceland when it’s windy. I swam 10 lengths, ran back to the middle hot pot (39 degrees), 10 lengths, hot pot etc until I’d done fifty lengths. By then it was dawning on me that I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast so I washed the pool out of my hair and came home.

Tomorrow I have to empty the car and hand it back 😦 It’s a bit of a mess. My camping stuff is still thrown in the back seat – I’ll need to find the bags for everything and put it away. Still, this time tomorrow I’ll be in Reykjavik and the Natura has its own spa pool. Last time I was there the room was uncomfortably cold but I’ll investigate tomorrow.

Iceland summer 2014: Wonders of the North

On Monday I went to see if the Edda breakfast is worth having. It is. Not only do they have orange juice and little bread rolls, they also have miniature croissants. I’m not a huge fan of croissants but if there are mini ones on offer, then I’ll go for it. And mini chocolate muffins and biscuits. I did not get caught out by cardboardy cereal again.

I went to see the wonders of the north. They don’t really have a tourism tag for them yet because there is next to no tourism infrastructure up in the north. There’s very little in the way of accommodation outside Akureyri despite the Wonders being an hour and half away from Akureyri. There’s no flybus from Akureyri airport into town! I want to go and watch the planes for a bit today because the runway is right in the middle of the fjord.

First stop was Godafoss, where Thorgeir the Godi threw his pagan statues into the water in 1000AD when Iceland was Christianised. It’s a nice little waterfall, overrun with tourists, many of whom get far too close to the edge.
Then I stopped at some odd lava formations on the edge of Lake Mývatn and got angry with some Spanish tourists who were determined to walk on the wrong side of the rope marking the path despite there being no difference – I might have at least understood if the path was rockier or muddier but it wasn’t.

Next was Dimmuborgir, a maze of quiet pleasant greenery among twisted lava formations. I visited the Yule Lads’ cave, which surprised me by being furnished, and strayed onto the hour long Church path by mistake. The Church itself is a bubble of lava which has popped, leaving something a bit more round than a simple lava arch.

I tried to get fuel and food at Reykjahlid but it was chaos. The queue went all the way around the supermarket, there were more 4x4s in the car park than I’ve ever seen before and the tanker was refilling the pumps.

I finally got fuel at Húsavík, nearly an hour away and over a long and unexpected gravel section of road. Húsavík’s main function is for whale-watching tours but it also sits on the side of a pretty fjord. I stopped on the hill just outside Húsavík for food and photos before heading on to Ásbyrgi which is a deep horseshoe-shaped canyon full of woodland and wandering paths. I hadn’t appreciated how deep it is – tipping my head back to look right up at the cliffs wasn’t such a great idea. I’d been driving for a long time so I settled down on the decking at the pond to just sit on the floor and relax.

My main stop for the day was Dettifoss and the biggest Wonder of the day is why haven’t they built a real road to join their biggest tourist attractions?! There are two roads joining Ásbyrgi and Dettifoss and according to my map, only the east one is paved. So I picked the east one. It is not paved! It is 56km of the worst gravel, rutted, washboard-like track through countryside that looks less inviting than most of the Interior! I was half-convinced I’d strayed onto an F road by mistake – a 4×4 only Interior route from which hire cars are banned. But no, this is what northern Iceland considers a suitable tourist route. It isn’t! This is why tourism concentrates on the south and not the north! It’s 2014 and I see that you don’t want to scar the landscape with unnecessary paved roads but I really think that one is worth the effort of paving and maintaining. I thought the car was going to shake apart, I didn’t know whether driving faster or slower would lessen the vibration and the tent pegs – which I left on the back parcel shelf in my panic on Saturday – spent the entire 56km trying to deafen me. Worst of all, it turns out the southern part of the west road (from Dettifoss down to the Ring Road) is in fact paved and “there’s talk of surfacing the entire road by 2014”. Read the guidebook, don’t just look at the map, which has been faultless up until now.

Dettifoss, when you have the time to properly appreciate it (and you’re putting off the horrors of going back on that road), is mind-blowingly powerful. Last year I saw it from the west side but stayed up high because we didn’t have long. This year I saw it from the east side, up close. Not too close – many people do go far closer than I feel is wise. It’s very powerful. The spray it throws up is almost strong enough for the water to bounce off. You can’t see the bottom. It’s carved out a deep sheer-sided canyon and the spray appears to have carved things too. Dettifoss is part of the Jökulsá á Fjöllum, which is a massive glacial river, flowing from 200km south at Vatnajökull – the whole river canyon right the way up to Ásbyrgi is part of the massive Vatnajökull National Park. The Jökulsá á Fjöllum is one of the most relentlessly grim places I’ve ever seen. The water is grey and opaque and churns and it cuts out a long grey rubble-strewn canyon. Even at Dettifoss, where the spray makes the banks bright green, all you see is grey. I met this particular river further south last year, near Askja and it was grey and grim and there was just a mess of basalt boulders everywhere. It’s magnificent, I love it, it’s just so grim that I’d love to see a proper post-apocalypse movie filmed along it.

A further 31km along that accursed track – overtaken by buses, 4x4s and even another i10 – and I was finally back.on real road, west of Mývatn. I passed the crater from Oblivion, which marks the start of the Askja F road – there are information boards 50 yards down there which I’m sure normal cars are allowed to visit but it’s not a good angle for photos. It’s real name is Hrossaborg, I think. It sits at the top of the Ódádahraun lava field – commonly translated into English as the Desert of Misdeeds. I did wonder if my gravel road ran through it but it turns out that’s the Borgarás Hólssandur. Incidentally, my car came with a map showing where I’m not legally allowed to drive and has some gravel roads marked in black as roads with high number of accidents involving foreign drivers. Yes, my gravel road was one of them! But my map showed it as paved – I was deliberately avoiding what I thought was the gravel road! Never mind. You get a better view of Dettifoss from the east anyway.

I got back to Mývatn just before 7. I’d skipped a few local.wonders – the blue-black boiling bubbling mud pools on the back of Krafla, a few hidden hot pools around Reykjahlid that are either too hot to swim in or too cold and thus riddled with bacteria. Instead I went somewhere I wanted to go last year and didn’t have time for – Mývatn Nature Baths. The Jardbödin are the northern version of the Blue Lagoon and if you’re going to compare and contrast, I think the Jardbödin actually win. The Blue Lagoon has a connecting door to the inside so you don’t have to go outside and get cold to get to the water and it does have the magic bracelet system so you can buy food & drinks while in the water and ok, the changing rooms are better but the Jardbödin win on setting, by miles. The Blue Lagoon is carved into a bowl of black lava, growing a hard white silicon shell. It has a view – from the right spot in the water – over the power station next door and of some small mountains. It’s a beautiful splash of bright milky blue in a black and white setting. Now, the Jardbödin are on the side of an active volcano, overlooking Mývatn and the plains on one side and black, red or orange volcanoes on the other three. The water is waste from a power station too, I think, and it also comes from a borehole but it’s heated by Krafla, which is pretty active and has erupted in my lifetime! Jardbödin are about half the size of the Blue Lagoon and just as touristed, in its northern way. It means it’s quieter. The pool ranges from painfully hot to quite pleasant, there’s a trough-like hot pot and there are underwater slabs to sit on. But unlike the Blue Lagoon, these slabs are covered in.some kind of slippery stuff and if you’re in the mod for being childish, you can slide on them. The sides where the steps come in make even better slides, if you can get to the top in the first place. Finally, the water is actually different to the Blue Lagoon. The Blue Lagoon’s water is very salty and really dries out your hair. I think the Jardbödin’s water is more sulphurous and it makes everything feel really soft. However, having unplaited my hair this morning, I think it’s a lot drier and bushier and nasty-feeling than I expected.

I spent about two hours in there and could have stayed longer. I watched the air temperature fluctuate between 14.2 and 13.6C, which meant the hot water felt nice instead of too hot. I drifted around, slid, enjoyed the view and reluctantly got out at 9.15, knowing I had a ninety minute drive still, over the mountains. I stopped briefly as I came into Akureyri’s fjord because the sun was setting at the mouth of the fjord – at eleven at night! – and making a huge blood-orange fireball that desperately needed photos. I was home ten or fifteen minutes later. It was a very long day.